Taliban troops line up on border

Published 9:00 pm Friday, September 21, 2001

Associated Press

TORKHAM, Pakistan – Taliban troops have taken up positions in the jagged mountain peaks overlooking Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, border officials said as they built up their own forces on the slopes across the frontier.

“They are in a warlike position. They have prepared themselves for full-scale war,” Pakistani border guard Mohammed Gul said in Torkham, a town that is normally a bustling border crossing but was quiet Friday.

“They have deployed fresh troops in the mountain posts,” Gul said of Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, pointing at peaks across the border above the outpost in the Khyber Pass.

A Pakistan Frontier Corps official confirmed the Taliban buildup and said Pakistan has countered with a fresh deployment of border troops on its side of the line. He didn’t say how many new soldiers were deployed.

Fears of a U.S. assault have sent thousands of Afghans fleeing toward the borders, compounding a refugee crisis already in full swing before the terror attacks, with tens of thousands of Afghans on the run after two decades of war and three years of devastating drought.

With the great steel gates in this border town shut tight and Taliban troops preventing all but a few Afghans from reaching them Friday, refugees in Torkham said thousands of others were trudging over tortuous mountains paths in an effort to cross the frontier.

“Every day, there are new rumors and new speculation,” said Mohammed Saeed.

Saeed said the word in the market was that the Taliban have deployed the medium-range Scud missiles they inherited from the Soviet Union during its disastrous decade of occupation, which ended in 1989.

“But they are all rumors. We don’t know,” he said. “It’s impossible to tell from here. You can’t see anything.”

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